Heller, Townsend, Undset

Book I am reading right now (or at least I would be if I weren't blogging):

Martin Amis, The Information

Zoe Heller, The Believers

Books on my to-read list recently recommended:

The Birth of Plenty, William Bernstein
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje
Independent People, Haldor Laxness

Re-reads for comfort:

The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul, Douglas Adams

one of the Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael medieval murder mysteries, can't remember the title

The Water Babies, Charles whosiwhatsit

Boy & Going Solo, Roald Dahl

New books actually read:
Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction, Sue Townsend
Kristin Lavransdatter, Sigrid Undset

Notes on a Scandal, Zoe Heller

lots of New Yorkers (finally caught up!)

Books bought:
The Piano Teacher, Janice Lee
When Will There Be Good News?, Kate Atkinson

the Zoe Hellers

I am finding it more and more difficult to be scrupulously honest about what I am reading, because setting myself the project of writing about it publicly makes me realize a) how much brain candy I read b) how much comfort re-reading of old books I do and c) how disorganized I am about having multiple books going simultaneously, depending on what happens to be next to the bed when bedtime rolls around. Oh, well. Luckily I don't think anyone's actually _reading_ this :).

Several of the books this month were picked up in an airport bookshop, so they come with the extra adrenaline-soaked frisson of having nearly missed a plane in order to purchase them (I got myself into a state of metaphysical crisis over the 4-books-for-the-price-of-3 deal: really I could only justify buying two for the plane ride, but then three is so _close_ to two, and once you have bought three then you get the fourth one _anyway_... oh GOD. I bought four, and just barely made it onto the flight in time.

The Martin Amis and the first Zoe Heller I am going to leave for another time, BUT I loved loved loved Notes on a Scandal. I definitely have a weakness for novels narrated by a character who is delusional about their own role in what is going on around them (viz: Kashuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day; John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure oh god, and of course, Lolita, favourite book of all time) and Notes on a Scandal is quite delicious on this score. (I had already seen the film, yay Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench, and liked it, and so was very pleased that the book-being-better-than-the-film rule also held true in this case.) Brief summary: young posh arty bohemian new teacher in enormous rough-and-tumble London comprehensive school befriends slightly creepy (as we discover) older female teacher, has affair with fifteen year old student, confides in older teacher, things go pear-shaped from there. I also love books with an edge of moral ambiguity: on the face of things, you think, "Teacher having affair with fifteen year old student? that's disgraceful/immoral/terrible; she should know better!" and then you read the story, and you start thinking, hm, well, I kind of see how she could have gotten into it... There is an interesting bit where the older teacher (who narrates the story) is trying to justify to herself the younger teacher's actions, and she asks how many of us can say that we have never had sexual thoughts about someone inappropriate (presumably meaning a minor, a relative, the partner of a close friend, etc. etc.), and extrapolating from there, if that person then suddenly took the initiative with you, are you sure you'd be so well-behaved...? and you think, oh my god, could I be the next Mary Kay LeTourneau? do I have that in me? I haven't seduced any underage patients yet, but I'll be sure and post it if I do, in the interests of science.

Speaking of unreliable narrators, Adrian Mole was the guilty pleasure of the month, although a mixed pleasure at this point. The self-absorbed cluelessness that made his adolescent diaries so hilarious and endearing becomes nearly excruciating to witness in an adult (in this last installment he is now in his mid-thirties, divorced with two kids) and the possibility of a genuinely happy ending for him seems infinitesimally small (is it possible to strip yourself of all your dearly held fantasies about yourself and do a total realignment with reality in order to trade in your insecurities after your teenage years? I am skeptical), although Sue Townsend does very gamely keep trying to provide him with true love and reality in equal doses, despite his gigantic, horrific character flaws. (In this installment, he becomes accidentally engaged to a terrifyingly neurotic Georgian dollhouse enthusiast named Marigold, extricates himself at the very last minute, and semi-inexplicably ends up with Marigold's sexy, rich, cosmopolitan, beautiful sister Daisy. We don't ever really get given an adequate Daisy's-eye view of him, particularly, but by the end of the book I was so desperate for him to get himself out of all his various disasters that I was more than willing to accept last-minute salvation by an attractive sane new girlfriend.

Last but not least on the new-books read: the long awaited Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy (I read The Wreath and The Wife; The Cross is going to have to wait until my next trip to the UK,where the book got left.) I had been saving it for this trip, and it turned out to be a nice concordance of length/heft of book to free reading time. It is an odd, odd book in several ways: it was written I think in the 1920's (in Norwegian), and Sigrid Undset won the Nobel Prize for Literature for it, which seems pretty avant garde, no? that a 1000+ page rambling proto-feminist family saga in Norwegian would be the pick of that year? The other thing that was odd was how _modern_ it felt - it's set in the fourteenth century, and I have always thought of historical fiction as being a relatively new genre: most 18th, 19th, and early 20th century novels are just set when they're written, as far as I know. I was a bit nervous starting it, as I had premonitions of tedium (understandable, given the length) and of too many characters (I was flipping back to the family tree thing in the front constantly when I read A Hundred Years of Solitude and it got frankly old) but actually it was fine on both counts.

The story follows Kristin from happy childhood on farm to dramatic elopement with and subsequent marriage to a difficult (for lack of a more unifying descriptor) man to motherhood. According to the introduction, it also goes through to her death at age __ of ___: I couldn't BELIEVE the guy who wrote the preface would drop that bomb on the second page of the introduction!! boo on him. but I didn't read the third book on purpose; I am hoping that by the time I get around to it I will have forgotten about the spoiler in the introduction and thus can jump into the third part of the trilogy with a clean slate). I was impressed by how earthy, overall, the writing was: there are descriptions of childbirth and breastfeeding and sex that, while they're not gratuitously gross or anything, leave you in absolutely no doubt that the author has experienced all those things firsthand and is not going to bother being coy about it (which again, feels very modern for the 1920's.). I did get a bit irritated with old Kristin towards the middle, I have to admit; she is touted on the back cover as a Strong Independent-Minded Woman, and yet she lets herself be seduced by a guy who is actually a bit of a drip, and not only sticks around to have about a million kids with him, she also does the irritating thing of continually misreporting her emotions, by which I mean: 'Kristin lay in Erlend's arms; although it was great to finally be in bed with him, she felt totally miserable because she knew how badly she was betraying her family and how incredibly disappointed her parents would be in her for letting herself be seduced by such a drip because even though she loved him w/ all her heart blah blah she realized he was a bit of a drip.' Then later on, 'Kristin was really pissed off with Erlend for being such a drip but she stayed with him because of the memory of how happy she had been that first time when she lay in his arms..." and you think, hunh? wait, she wasn't happy then either! wtf! why is this supposedly Strong Independent Woman making such drippy decisions for herself? anyway. I'll get over it.

I'm not going to write about my comfort re-reading this month, except to say that re-reading Boy and Going Solo was a bittersweet experience: I loved both those books when I was younger, and now, as with other previously intense childhood loves (the Narnia series, The Sound of Music), they are starting to look embarrassingly dated. Boy not so much, because his life is limited to family and school, which are fairly transcendent experiences that we can all relate to (and he does a brilliant job of bringing his childhood voice to immediate and vivid life) but for the first time I noticed uncomfortable patriotic/colonialist overtones in Going Solo, and a few bits had me wanting to stick my fingers in my ears and sing la la la while I read.

OH and one more very, very important set of books on the to-read list: I recently discovered there are MORE THAN THREE of Graham Oakley's fantastic Church Mice books. I got on Amazon and ebay, and they are out of print and selling used for up to several hundred dollars a pop, which is terrifying but understandable, given just how TOTALLY AND UTTERLY FANTASTIC they are. I bid on two that were in Australia, going for thirty dollars each, but I lost the auction. So put the word out: if anyone, anywhere, sees any Graham Oakley Church Mice books (other than the three I already have, which are The Church Mouse, The Church Mice Spread Their Wings, and The Church Mice Go to the Moon) buy 'em and either make a fortune re-selling them on ebay or, better yet, give them to me as a Christmas present...